Introducing the Narrative-Based Emotioncy Model in Updating and Revising the Content of Coursebooks Featuring History of Persian Language

Persian language is one of the main cores of national identity in Iran; hence, efforts should be made to preserve it and awareness about it should be raised. The Supreme Council for Higher Education introduced a compulsory two-credit course for the history of Persian language. There is no doubt that this course demands a coursebook to facilitate learning and teaching as it is really important that coursebooks content be systematically arranged so that learning is not negatively affected or hampered. Research has it that content which is unfit and unsuitable and is not in line with student learning capacity results in the inefficiency of learning and teaching. Therefore, determining and developing effective course content according to the learners’ demands and cognitive and learning capacities is a must (Niknafs & Aliabadi, 2013).
The interconnectedness of emotions and learning underpins the importance of students’ emotional engagement with the course content as the content should look and sound appealing enough to them. Narration appears to be a powerful technique to make the content engaging and attractive and to increase students’ motivation for learning. Narration is a sequence of events happening in time and place (Lothe, 2009). Numerus forms of narration can be found and this study focuses on the application of short stories as narrative text. Accordingly, text has diverse functions, including referential, emotive, persuasive, phatic, metalingual, and poetic, and each function plays a pivotal role in student’s successful learning. Metalingual and poetic functions bring about enjoyment and amusement and greatly affect audience. Also, the use of emotive and phatic functions can give pleasure to audience and give a sense of knowledge and understanding. The persuasive function shapes people’s attitudes and enables the sense of empathy, identity and imprinting. As a result, the learner directly encounters the content and can feel and analyze it. This helps students better internalize the information and learning materials. Additionally, when students are emotionally engaged in the stories and identify with the characters, they can easily memorize the materials (Sovia & Afrineta, 2017).
Students’ emotional experiences can improve their ability to learn as emotions act as facilitators within the classroom and strengthen interactions among teachers and students, resulting in boosting the motivation for learning (Meyer & Turner, 2006).
On account of the interconnectedness of emotions and learning, Pishghadam (2015) introduced the emotioncy notion which is a combination of emotion and frequency, wherein emotions are counted as the core of learning. This model hinges on the varying degrees of sensory emotions each word has and carries for individuals in their own society and these emotions are constructed through frequent exposure to diverse types of senses. More specifically, an individual has a higher degree of emotioncy towards a word when they have heard, seen, touched, experienced that word (Pishghadam et al., 2013). Emotioncy, as Pishghadam (2015) introduces, stands on a hierarchical matrix of six levels, including Null (0), Auditory (1), Visual (2), Kinesthetic (3), Inner (4), and Arch (5) or more specifically, avolvement (null) and exvolvement (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) to involvement (inner and arch).
Null emotioncy happens when an individual has not heard about, seen, or experienced an object or a concept while Auditory emotioncy has it that an individual has merely heard about a word. Visual emotioncy concerns the fact that an individual has both heard about and seen the item and Kinesthetic emotioncy occurs when an individual has touched, worked, or played with the real object. It is Inner emotioncy where an individual has directly experienced the word and Arch emotioncy implies that an individual has done research to get additional information.
Despite the fact that motivation and emotions have been of importance in preparing and compiling educational resources and influence teachers and learners, the importance of the psychological factors in designing coursebooks has been ignored. This is because the main objective of many coursebooks is to convey information, and consequently, students’ emotions and feelings are simply overlooked. On the whole, relying upon the significance of students’ emotions and motivations in learning, the present study attempts to bring to the light the model of narrative-based emotioncy as a tentative model for revising coursebooks featuring history of Persian language.